O P I N I O N S

Guest Column
Women are working, but who’s counting
Most women in our lives would be working long hours without rest and our homes would be dysfunctional without them. However, neither is their contribution nominally measured nor is there sufficient, if any, recompense for their efforts.
Harpal Singh
THE inadequate recognition and decided disadvantage that girls and women experience in the economic life of our country is staggering.

Fifty Fifty
Voters, like politicians, are also wise
If the Election Commission, which has been a very strong and independent body, succumbs to this unusual political pressure, it will indeed be a tragedy and one which the voter must rally against.
Kishwar Desai
Psephology, especially on television, is not new to India. In fact, when I had just joined television more than two decades ago, some of the most exciting moments were spent at NTDV, working on the election programmes.

Why Manmohan finally decided to skip Lanka
What appears to have tilted the balance for the Prime Minister not to attend was the fact that Rajapaksa was unwilling to make any concessions on greater devolution of powers to Tamils even if Manmohan Singh did go.
Raj Chengappa
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s decision not to attend the 23rd Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) being held from November 15 to 17 in Colombo was one of the toughest on foreign policy he had to take in his almost decade-long tenure as Prime Minister. Days before the event, the divide between the political class on one side and his strategic advisers on the other was marked and out in the open.

EDITORIALS

Guest Column
Women are working, but who’s counting
Most women in our lives would be working long hours without rest and our homes would be dysfunctional without them. However, neither is their contribution nominally measured nor is there sufficient, if any, recompense for their efforts.
Harpal Singh

THE inadequate recognition and decided disadvantage that girls and women experience in the economic life of our country is staggering. In no other instance would the imbalance between contribution and benefits be as sharply mismatched as with the female gender in India. Girls and women neither enjoy economic power nor adequate voice, a fact that is embarrassing in its magnitude. Why is this so? As Alice Walker once argued, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” Clearly the female voice needs to be heard louder and with greater import.

Unquestionably, the time has come to change the equation and to restore some balance, even more so when contributions to the GDP in the future are much more likely to come from knowledge power rather than physical superiority. In making the shift all means need to be adopted from changing laws to changing social and cultural norms that suppress (if not suffocate) the voice of girls and women. New platforms of the “Nanhi Chhaan” variety need to be promoted to accelerate the pace of change. Loud and effective advocacy combined with actions on the ground is the need of the hour. Let’s examine a little more about today’s reality.One would be hard-pressed to find any other strata of society anywhere on earth whose recognition and contribution to society is wholly at odds with their presence in it. Indian women make up nearly 48 per cent of the Indian population (7.5 per cent of the global population, or 614 million in actual number) but India ranks 113 out of the universe of 135 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index.

While overall there is some progress (significant only if one accounts for a low starting point) on many major social indicators for women — mortality rates, literacy rates, access to sanitation, food and healthcare — there remain significant questions on their economic impact in society, especially in a country where girls and women are often seen by their own families as an economic burden. Intriguingly this is at considerable odds with the great Indian family tradition. After all, women are the edifice around which Indian families are usually built. Most women in our lives would be working long hours without rest and our homes would be dysfunctional without them. However, neither is their contribution nominally measured nor is there sufficient, if any, recompense for their efforts.

The UNDP Human Development Report says that while 67 per cent of the world’s work is done by woman, merely 10 per cent of global income is earned by women and only 1 per cent of the property in the world is owned by women. One may not be wrong in saying that the position is even worse when it comes to calculating our very own Indian GDP. Women may work hard behind the scenes to maintain the house and children so that the husband may concentrate on his job and earn money but since there is no monetary value ascertained for her work, it has no bearing on the computation of the GDP. Ironically, if two neighbouring women were to work at each other’s homes and be paid identically, our GDP value would appreciate dramatically! Quite apart from earning an income, the fact that their contributions would be valued will have a salutary effect on their status as also on the seriousness with which their voices are heard. In the same spirit, to do honour to girls, Nanhi Chhaan invokes all citizens to plant a sapling for the women in their lives. Through such simple yet emotive acts the agenda for the uplift of women will gain momentum as it enters the home of every Indian family.

A recent report by Booz & Company, a consultancy, stated that if female labour participation rates in India were to match those for men, the Indian GDP would resultantly increase by more than 20 per cent by 2020. A similar study by the Evangelical Social Action Forum valued the unpaid household work performed by women throughout India as upwards of $ 612.8 bn — more than a third of our current GDP! A good starting point could be that in computing household income one-third of the total household income of all Indian households is ascribed and credited to the account of the homemaker, a majority of who are women. By recognising her contribution and crediting her account, society will harvest innumerable benefits on issues like education, health, hygiene and nutrition with all the attendant multiplier effects.

The need of the hour is to educate and create awareness about the extent of the economic contribution of women to our society and to do so on an ongoing basis. While everyone realises that what women do is important, very few realise the amount of their contribution. And this change would have to start from women themselves. After all no one realises your value if you don’t. Can the ‘Nanhi’ please stand up.

— The writer is chairman of the Nanhi Chhaan Foundation and Save the Children, India

Fifty Fifty
Voters, like politicians, are also wise
If the Election Commission, which has been a very strong and independent body, succumbs to this unusual political pressure, it will indeed be a tragedy and one which the voter must rally against.
Kishwar Desai

Psephology, especially on television, is not new to India. In fact, when I had just joined television more than two decades ago, some of the most exciting moments were spent at NTDV, working on the election programmes. At that time the legendary (and very charismatic) Dr Prannoy Roy led the team, talking about the ‘mood of the nation’. Of course many of the faces we now see on television speaking ever so knowledgeably about elections were young enthusiasts of this new discipline — learning from Dr Roy — and his very competent and talented wife, Radhika Roy, who was also the producer of the election specials. Between them the Roys understood how to make the election process and the results (which was then just an esoteric and rather boring exercise of casting and counting votes) exciting on television. The counting at the time was done manually in centres spread all over the country, and so the election programmes took much longer than they do today with electronic voting machines.

The sole objective of the entire production team was how to make a long drawn out process interesting. This was before the explosion of multiple television channels —and yes, dear readers, they were making the shows for Doordarshan.

Luckily, of course, other television channels abroad, such as the BBC, already had given us good templates to follow, and the programmes became quicker, slicker more engrossing. Mushrooming television channels in the last decade has also meant many more commentators and analysts with different styles of presentation, in different languages.

As the science of psephology has grown so has the methodology through which pre-poll sample surveys are now conducted to test the way the people are likely to vote. In the UK, too, newspapers, both from the left and the right wing, conduct opinion polls almost on a weekly basis, and prior to elections many more opinion polls are conducted by television channels as well. Even though the opinion polls, recently, have been very unfavourable to the ruling coalition in the UK, never once has anyone raised an objection or said the polls should be banned. They have used the opinion polls to do, if possible, some course correction.

Similarly till last week in the New York mayoral elections, almost all the pre-poll surveys showed that the Democrat contender Bill de Blasio would win by almost a 40 per cent margin. Yet no one from the other side condemned the surveys or threw into doubt their veracity. These are all signs of mature democracies where politicians realise that, like them, the voters are also wise and unlikely to be swayed in a particular direction just on the basis of a poll. If that were the case, then in 2004, when all polls were showing a win for BJP, the Congress ought to have lost.

So why did so many Congresswalas, their UPA allies and future allies such as the JD (U), suddenly get into a tizzy over pre-poll surveys? Why did they discover, overnight (after all these years) that the survey methodology is rubbish and that often psephologists are biased? It is also amusing to see that many of the politicians who are now complaining about the bias are the same who fall over themselves to come to studio discussions when in the past they have been seen to be on the winning side.

The most worrying aspect for many of us is the hidden fascism it reveals at the heart of a party that professes to be liberal. Would they prefer the end of free speech than to listen to any ‘bad news’ — as their agitation erupted only when a television channel showed conclusively that the wind seemed to be blowing in the direction of the BJP prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi? Even if the polls are wrong, why couldn’t they be ignored? This is also despite the fact that far more serious aspects of manipulation seem to exist: such as advertisements given by politicians to prop up certain supportive media groups, or the fact that some politicians might have vested interests or relationships with particular television channels or newspapers. The obvious bias in some newspapers and magazines is also never examined, and yet these are much more likely to have a longer lasting impact on the voter. If the Election Commission, which has till now been a very strong and independent body, succumbs to this unusual and very reprehensible political pressure from the Congress, it will indeed be a tragedy and one which the Indian voter must rally against, and be wary about.

To ban pre-election surveys would be a serious blow on our hard-won freedom of speech, and on the freedom of the Press.